Upgrade advice

Hi

I am not that familiar with gaming rigs but please take a look at this spec of a PC, i have been asked what can make it faster with a £500 budget, my first guess is 2 X £250 sweet new graphics cards but i am not sure

Mobo - ASUS M2N-SLI DLX

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+AM2+%28AMD%29/ASUS+M2N-SLI+DLX++nF570+Socket+AM2+Motherboard+?productId=23584

CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/CPUs+%2F+Processors/AMD/Athlon+64+X2+Socket+AM2/AMD+Athlon+64+X2+Dual+Core+4600%2B+2.40GHz+%28Retail+AM2%29+?productId=22855

Memory 4 Gig - OCZ 2GB PC2-8800 Gold Edition

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Memory/DDR2/DDR2+1100+%28PC8800%29/OCZ+2GB+PC2-8800+Gold+Edition+%282x1GB%29+?productId=24374

Graphics - NVIDEA GeForce 7600 GS - 512MB X2 SLI

http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPF-ASUS-Asus-EN7600GS-Silent-HTD-GeForce-7600-GS-PCI-Express-512MB-DDR2-Video-Card-w-TV-Out-DVI-Retail

Any help would be much appreciated

Lee H

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Comments

Ahriakin

SLI is under supported and a bit flakey, plus you can usually expect a 50% performance increase at best. You're better off spending the cash on a single higher end card. Not to mention the 7.x series are older tech. and just don't support as much features as the newer 8.x Nvidias. The 8800 GTS is a great card, go for the higher ram models as newer game engines are really making use of it.

dynamik

How much of a performance increase will I see with SLI technology?
The amount of performance improvement will depend on the application and its ability to scale. Several of today's hottest games see a full 2x increase in performance when using SLI technology with two graphics cards. 3-way NVIDIA SLI technology enables up to 2.8x performance increase over a single GPU. In general, applications running at higher resolutions with higher image quality settings will benefit most.

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_faq.html

Some of my friends run SLI and get significantly higher than just 50% and recent benchmarks typically show that as well. You're not going to consistently double your performance, but you'll typically get 80%+. Have you tried SLI lately? It was flaky at first, but it's been fairly mature for awhile.

You're even going to be able to go quad with the new ones: http://kotaku.com/340526/meet-the-new-geforce-graphics-card

My typical advice with SLI, is get an SLI-capable motherboard, then put the nicest single GPU in there that you can afford. When you actually need that performance boost in a couple years, you'll be able to add in that other card at a very low price.

I'd definitely get a DirectX 10.1 Card to get the most life out of your upgrade.

Ahriakin

Just about every major FPS I've seen in the last few months had issues with SLI to start with (though most eventually patched it in), and I believe Nvidia had major issues with it in Vista. I'm not saying it's bad (I have an SLI mbd just in case too) just that it shouldn't be relied on as giving the boost 2 cards would suggest in all games all the time.